Mona's Story
by killercattails
Summary: An alternate origin story for the Turtles, told by Raphael's life long "companion".


Chapter 1: Runaways

In our youth we start out believing in the myths we create, then move on to those our parents give us. Later on, when we shed our innocence to learn cynics, the nostalgia of those sweet lies fondly colors our memories. We are, after all, born to belief.

So there is a time between the dream and the waking when we shrug off Santa and the Easter Bunny, question religion and history, and hunt for ghosts in the dark places. In other words, we are testing belief. We are testing our capacity to trust, and we are testing the wonder factor of the world. We have yet to form the story of our existence. We are still looking at the dream, whether or not we are willing to admit it to ourselves.

This is the time between being a child, and being an adult, and this is the stage I was at when I first encountered the unexplainable. It wasn't that my parents didn't try or couldn't. But there was so much shouting behind closed doors, of secrets no one dared to tell me. I stopped believing in many things after that, including the solemn word of my father.

And I was nine the day I packed what few belongings I could and left the house after dark. Of course it was stupid, and reactionary: I didn't get my way or I was told too many times to mind my own business. All I remember is that it involved my father, as huge as God before me, as stoic as the Old Testament. I had heard, "That's that," one too many times. Late in the night, I packed a few toys, clothes, a book, and some food and in a back pack and I headed out the door, purposely making a racket, purposely leaving the front door unlocked in my passage. A test perhaps? Who knows? No one woke, and no one came out shouting.

Summer was just beginning, the evening air a cool swamp of filthy smells, the breeze tasting bitter. My family lived in an older area of the city: an industrial township long ago swallowed up by the greater metropolis, protected now by its heritage foundations. It was kept up but on the outskirts of everything. How I managed to walk unaccosted is a miracle that still perplexes me to this day. I walked for nearly an hour following its ashy sidewalks until I found an old railroad behind some storage buildings, and these I followed out to an old rail road bridge. The walk gave me enough time to get over my anger, to let fear grow inside me as I considered what I was giving up in striking out on my own…

--I nearly fell on top of the one encounter that would change the course of my life forever.--

…Coming upon him was like stumbling over a green boulder. He was not the keen listener that he is today. But lost in our own thoughts, we startled each other on that moonlit summer night by nearing falling over each other.

I was not ten yards away from him when I noticed a movement near my feet. Someone was sitting on the edge of the old railroad bridge kicking their legs just as high as they could go. You have to understand that the following happened in an instant.

My scraping feet kicked a pebble, and who ever, what ever was sitting there was suddenly up and standing. My first impression was of something my approximate height covered all in green. Hidden in by the shadows I had no idea was I was staring at, but I did get the startling view of terribly human eyes in a not so human skull.

The eyes were huge, brown, shining, and terrified. There was a moment of complete surprise when I heard a rush of air, as if someone was releasing a parachute, and suddenly this shadowy doppelganger had a hump.

We were reacting, not understanding. No time. No time to really take in any thing but those brown, human eyes, and then see them flicker suddenly to my shoulder. I turned reflexively, seeing nothing, and when I turned again the thing was gone.

But I still wasn't alone.

Miracles have a way of happening in there own time, if at all. Timing is everything, and I realized as another something appeared on the rails behind me that I had not left the neighborhood alone.

Who knows who the person was? Who really cares by now? Whoever it was meant me harm on an infinite amount of levels simply because I was young, or black, or a girl, or alive. Their crimes were those perpetrated in the silent hours of the night when the victim's voice is lost forever, and they are free to repeat as often as they like. My voice would be the next to be silenced for sure—

--except that as the stranger approached, something careened into him or her from the side. Throwing my arms over my head, I heard ribs crack and loosening masonry, and a very adult cry go up followed by a huge splash. Then a very warm, strong, small hand gripped my wrist and pulled me at a run from the bridge. The strength and speed of the runner alarmed me, but I only had enough thought left to keep my feet underneath me we made our way back into the neighborhood.

Taking back allies between industrial buildings, past empty lots and gated parking spaces we flew, my guide moving through a map in his head apparently. And when we finally found a doorway hidden behind a dumpster, we threw ourselves down and tried to catch our collective breath. Winded, I had blurry vision and was only able to make out the other person gasping for air as he looked around the corner.

Slowly as my stomach started to settle and my heart calm down, I was able to blink and discern what was in front of me. Again, the shadows didn't give up much, but I saw a bent figure right next to me, near my own size but slightly thicker. There was a smell of the sea in the morning after a rain.

I saw a hump, I didn't see a hump: it was gone as quickly as it came. Then the heaving figure loosened his stiff posture, turned to look at me with those huge brown eyes set in a round, bald skull, and slid his back down the door until he was sitting next to me on the dirty payment.

"Well?" said the green boy, "get an eye full? Or do you want me to stand in the light so you can getter a better look at the freak?" His voice was husky, almost gravelly.

His bluntness, delivered in that gravely tone, shocked me more than his appearance. My ogling must have unnerved him, and the snide remark reminded me of how my older brother responded to my father when he was caught doing something embarrassing. I gurgled something, but the boy only blinked, and sighed. He suddenly seemed to sag. He sat starring at his scruffy jeans, scratching his bare chest with what looked like a two fingered hand.

"Who would believe you anyway?" he muttered to the ground. I expected him to sound triumphant, but the words came out sad, slow, and lonely. Something in them woke me up a little, and I blurted out, "I don't really care who you are: you saved me from god knows what…but do you blame me for staring?"

To anyone else this would sound rude, but I think he read it as "I really don't care _what_ you are," and it made his shadowy face nearly split in a wide grin. This was the first time Raphael showed me who he truly was, and I took the moment to draw closer to him and blatantly inspect my rescuer. Maybe I wasn't afraid of him, but I damn sure wanted to understand what I was looking at, completely awestruck at his very existence.

The green boy, startled by his discovery a while before, now sat quietly under my obvious inspection. He regarded me under half closed lids, followed my gaze with a turn of his thick neck. He hummed tunelessly seeming to almost relish my long and scrutinizing stare.

Regarded as a freak, a fiend, or a friend, he wasn't lonely right now. Later on when I crawled into bed I would meditate on what that meant for him, and how terrible it must be to rely on that type of isolation for survival. Lonely even among his brothers, walling himself away from harm with sarcasm and false bravado. But all this is in the future. He hasn't written his story yet. At this age I am only glimpsing a hint of what he will be.

Now that I was calm, I was a little awe struck, a little reflective. The light from the streetlamps came in just enough for me to see him. He was a child, not a buff bodybuilder, but he had more tone than any child I'd ever seen. I was reminded of a kid I saw on television who lacked an enzime that prevented muscle growth. He wasn't buff either, but you could see the muscles in his back, and his stomach wasn't round like other toddlers. When you lifted the boy by his arms, he could pull himself up, an impossible feat for any child his age. This is the first thing I thought of when I looked at the green boy. Stocky, a little. But not bulky. His proportions were normal, just more sculpted.

The second thing I was reminded of was dolphins. His green skin had a soft mat sheen to it, a smooth perfection that only set off the little muscles in his arms, his back, and his shoulders. Looking closer I saw that he wasn't all one color. Coming up from his shoulders and down his arms were pixels of varying shades of ever green, hunter green, sage, all combining in a very dark, dusky green. As the tiny speckles reached his chest, I noticed the skin turned to a sort of tough green-yellow armor. At this time I assumed he could feel no pain through that armor: I would learn later how terrifyingly wrong I would be…

He folded his arms on his chest as I brought my face inches from his. He gave me a wide, mocking grin, full of flat glinting teeth. He had no lips to speak of, barely two slits for nostrils, high prominent cheek bones, prominent brow and in between were those wet, amber eyes the size of golf balls. I stared at him, unblinking, and he playfully snapped his teeth at me. He was uncomfortable with how close I was to him. Maybe another human child never got the chance to get this close to him.

I did the last thing he expected. I touched his face. Taboo! I lost him. I lost his smile. He rose up, reflexively pushing me away, and we suddenly stood apart at opposite ends of the alley, risking discovery. But he was glaring at me now, angry, and underneath that, the terror I had seen when we first met. I don't know what I did, but apparently it was okay to look and not touch. When he turned away I saw his back, covered in what looked like a tattoo of a shell, but now popping up rigid as he grew agitated. I didn't understand it then, but now I see he could feign that cool demeanor until you got too close, and touching him took him over the edge. I didn't know how to fix it, so I did the only thing I could do. I stuck my tongue at him. It was enough. He gave me a look, shook himself and muttered," Do you want me to walk you home?"

I ran my fingers thru my hair and nodded, suddenly feeling so tired. "If you really want to, stranger."

"My name is Yoshiro Raphael," he grunted, hands in his pockets.

"Are you Italian _and_ Japanese?"

The more I provoked him, the more he seemed to relax. I was treating him like a normal person, he acted normal, and his body parts were in the right places. So what if he wasn't human? So what if he was—

"—a giant turtle. If I can absorb human culture, I'd be a sponge. I'm not. I'm a giant turtle."

"A giant turtle wearing jeans and speaking English…

"My first language is Japanese."

"Whatever! That's it. Walk me home, if you think we can get there without incident. But I get to play twenty questions."

"Can you handle the answers?"

"They can't possibly worse than that name."

"Is yours any better?"

I shrugged," Mona Lyza."

"Oh shit!" he laughed, "I don't want to hear anything from you about names! Twenty questions then. Come on."

He took my hand in his, the only touch he would allow between us, and I asked my questions, and as I did I meditated on the stolen touch to his face, how smooth and warm and firm the skin on his brow had been, the instant before he realized what I had done. The questions led us down the streets in the dark places as I told him in between answers where to turn and he kept his eyes constantly moving without looking like he was cautious. His jeans rustled as we talked, his naked feet slapped silently on the pavement. He had two toes on each foot, nails on both. His hands and feet were larger than mine. Slowly I began to realize my tiny fingers were wrapped around his huge left thumb: this would be a constant between us as later in life, that I would never completely be able to hold his hand, just his thumb or finger. At this age, if his buddies had been around he would have shrugged it off. But for the rest of our lives thereafter he humored me without comment.

He was a being born in another place and time, one full of terrible wars and revolutions where countries and borders had disintegrated along with the environment. He and his three brothers had been sent to our Earth to be raised in safe obscurity by a human family friend. But the gangs had a presence there that they could not ignore, and they were born of warrior stock: they had to fight back. They were begging their foster father, a man learned in many martial art forms, to teach them the basics. He was refusing to do so, wanting to keep them safe until their parents could come for them. That time never came: their world was too volatile, but the boys would not live without purpose. In years to come the foster father taught them well enough so that no gang would dare set foot on their turf, the neighborhood was protected not just by them but the neighbors themselves…but here I'm getting into things that haven't happened yet.

He was a visitor from another place, practically an orphan, just a year older than me. His growth was surprisingly similar to our own. And I knew, although he never said it, that he was terribly lonely, trying to hide it, acting out when he could no longer contain his sorrow. But I also knew that he was careful, so tonight twenty questions was it, in fact tonight may be the last time I see him, I thought.

I shared a few things about myself: my father was in the transport business, that's all I knew. Later I would find out just what and who he transported, and the kind of underhanded deals he dealt, but again that was to come. Raphael didn't say it in words, but in his expression I could tell he related to my own situation: being kept in the dark, being isolated even among one's family, being misunderstood or worse, invisible. We had a long awkward silence, then I kind of punched him in the shoulder, he feigned injury, and we agreed that we were both going to get out asses handed to us the moments we got home. That's how my test was past. My parents awake at last.

It took us a few silent moments to depart each other's company. We were reluctant to break the small, quick world we had created in that short time together. But it had to end. He signed, looking up from the ground to me, eyes shimmering in the moonlight. He gave me that lopsided smile and suddenly disappeared into the night.

It would be years before I saw him again.

Every other smile I saw after that on anyone else seemed so fake to me, until the night I saw it again under the supports of that same railroad bridge…


End file.
